Interview Wirh General Mattis

This is about 40 minutes long, and worth every second of your time.

I think President Elect Trump has made a wise choice....





And I just saw this over at the Western Rifle Shooters Association:

Be Safe, and Stay Alert

a.k.a. "Condition Yellow".

We won a major battle in November, but this war is far from over.....

Is Trump "Your" President?

For those that don't get it, a simple flowchart:

CBS Comes Clean

Or about as close to it as the lamestream media is capable of doing.

Go RTWT over here.

More Rain

Which is cool because drought!

It started an hour or so ago as a light sprinkle, and now it's a genuine RAIN storm. It's under .1" as of a few seconds ago when I checked my weather station, but NOAA says it should continue most of the day.

Good news for the Central Valley area where a lot of farming is done. We didn't have any reported mudslides from the last storms that came through, but if this one dumps a lot of rain that might just change.

And the little Airspy SDR radio just keeps plugging along. I did some monitoring of the APT Weather Satellites, and although I didn't save the audio files to convert them to images, I saw NO signs of strong-signal "breakthrough" like I did with the USB dongles I was using.

If you're looking for a Software Defined Radio receiver that's far better than the $25 dongles, this one gets my vote.

And I've tried almost all of them....

Happy Thanksgiving

Having some family members and friends over for dinner and some board/card games.

Hope your day is a happy one as well!

Airspy SDR First Report

I didn't need to find a USB extension as the USB cable that came with this little was plenty long enough to reach from the back of my Linux PC all the way around to the front and still have a couple of feet left.

SO....I plugged it in, ran dmesg, and was reqward with the following:

[17442.607014] usb 1-1.6: new high-speed USB device number 4 using ehci-pci
[17442.700026] usb 1-1.6: New USB device found, idVendor=1d50, idProduct=60a1
[17442.700040] usb 1-1.6: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[17442.700042] usb 1-1.6: Product: AIRSPY
[17442.700044] usb 1-1.6: Manufacturer: www.airspy.com
[17442.700045] usb 1-1.6: SerialNumber: AIRSPY SN:573064DC314023C1
[17443.788553] Linux video capture interface: v2.00
[17443.818345] airspy 1-1.6:1.0: Board ID: 00
[17443.818350] airspy 1-1.6:1.0: Firmware version: AirSpy NOS v1.0.0-rc10-0-g946184a 2016-09-19
[17443.819047] airspy 1-1.6:1.0: Registered as swradio0
[17443.819050] airspy 1-1.6:1.0: SDR API is still slightly experimental and functionality changes may follow
[17443.819079] usbcore: registered new interface driver airspy


 This tells me it discovered a new USB device, queried it, and the device responded with it's ID, and the revisions, including what firmware is loaded into it. Very nice!

Then I started GQrx, selected "AIRSPY" from the choices, and brought up KLOS, 95.5MHz.

After that check, I tuned it to 162.550MHz for NOAA Weather Radio, and set up the filters and gain settings appropriate to listening to narrow FM voice.

It's been sitting like that for about an hour now, and there's been NO "break through" from strong local transmitters, and no funny images or spurs appearing in the panadaptor/waterfall display.

This is quite a bit better than any of the USB dongles I've tried, and I suspect it would be quite a bit better than the SDRplay receiver I have, although I gave up trying to make that radio work with Gqrx.

I haven't tried it with Linrad yet, but I'm sure it will work just fine.

And I suppose I'll try the GNURadio Companion program again, but it's pretty obtuse to use, and assumes you know a whole lot about exactly what you want to do with your hardware, and also understand the hardware extremely well.

So far, this little receiver looks like a real winner!

Radios and Rain!

It's raining cats and dogs here right now. Rate was was up to 1.5"/hr, and we've received about .65" since it started this morning. It's backed off to .45"/hr and the NWS radar shows the major portion of the storm has gone through, but there's another one right behind it.

We sure need the rain, but I hope it doesn't cause flooding.

AND....my Airspy Software Defined Radio  arrived the other day.

This one uses a 12-bit ADC, which gives it much better dynamic range than any of the inexpensive dongles have, and it's built into an aluminum extrusion with metal end plates, something lacking in both the SDRplay, and the vaunted HackRF One.

I haven't connected it to a PC yet due to some problems here. My KVM switch has failed again, and although this one has everything I want, this particular model just isn't very reliable. It's been "stuck" on the port for my Linux PC  for a couple of months, and I've tried everything I can think of to get it "unstuck". At first the mouse was acting strange, then the keyboard started giving me double, missing, or wrong characters. I wound up attaching a mouse and keyboard to the front USB connectors which made the PC reliable, and then it pretty much failed completely, with the buttons on the front panel becoming unresponsive. It still passes the video, but otherwise it's just a $125 lump. Replacing it with something different will require tearing apart about half my radio station due to the fact that I've got all the cables routed "nice and pretty". I'll probably just run a USB extension cable from one of the back ports on this (Linux) PC so I can try out the Airspy, and scratch my head a while longer on what to do about the KVM problem.....

Quiet Day....

Just sitting here enjoying my 2nd cup of coffee, and waiting for a laptop to decide if it's going to boot up or not.

Friday night I'll be running the auction for one of my radio clubs, and Saturday I'll be on the Iowa from 1000~1700 to help host a large Ham club visit. No word on if we'll escort them down to the transmitter room, but if we have enough people we'll take them down there. There's a "Two Man" rule in effect anytime you go down to Broadway, and we're required to have flashlights and a radio so we can keep in touch with Security.

December 7th we'll be operating NI6BB in memory of Pearl Harbor Day, so I'll be down there all day for that.

And the progress on getting the house ready for sale continues. I've got a ton of stuff I'm going to get rid of, and we have a "Large Item" trash pick up scheduled for the end of November. We've got some old furniture, a 75 gallon aquarium tank, and some other misc items to get rid of. I'm willing to bet some of it won't make it on the trash truck, as we have a couple of "junque dealers" who cruise the neighborhood two or three times a week looking at the items people kick to the curb, and they haul them away to do whatever with.

Did Angel Just Get A Mention On "Day By Day"?

I think she started the "Trump Acceptance Resistance Disorder", a.k.a "TARD".

If so....CONGRATS ANGEL!

Poor Little Snowflakes!

My daughter-in-law was FarceBooking with all her friends the other day to attend this anti-Trump rally in Fort Collins. Even though she was born and raised in Colorado, I think the time she spent out here at CSU Long Beach might have addled her a bit.

Read the whole article here, and enjoy!